The last few years have been disastrous for the cryptocurrency industry—at least in terms of public reputation. A little over 15 years after bitcoin’s emergence promised to transform the global economy around the values of greater privacy and financial freedom, a series of high-profile scandals have seen trust in cryptocurrency plummet to staggering lows. 

The decentralized currency has been characterized by sharp, sudden rises and falls in value—as seen in the profitable “bull run” of 2017 and the “crypto winter” that followed in early 2018—leaving many traders facing staggering losses. More recently, a series of high-profile court cases against industry leaders who cheated traders out of millions and billions of dollars highlighted the risks associated with investing in this under-regulated sector. 

This all came to a head with the downfall of FTX cryptocurrency exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March 2024 for defrauding customers and investors alike. In the wake of the revelation that one of the industry’s leading figures had taken billions from customers in order to buy property and make political donations (among other unauthorized uses), crypto’s remaining power figures began looking for a way to rebuild as their reputation lay in tatters.

Their calculation? That if they couldn’t win the trust of the public at large, they would use their millions to create a supportive majority in Congress. Three crypto-backed super PACS—innocuously named Defend American Jobs, Fairshake, and Protect Progress—spent more than $265 million in the 2024 election cycle trying to oust crypto skeptics in favor of candidates who had signaled a willingness to ease regulations on the currency. 

Even before November, the PACs had racked up a number of big wins. Fairshake spent $10 million boosting Adam Schiff (who received an A-rating from the crypto industry) in the Senate primary over Katie Porter, a progressive known for taking tough stances against corporate greed. Schiff went on to convincingly beat Porter in the March primary and won the general election in November. Similarly, the group spent more than $2 million opposing New York representative and fellow progressive Jamaal Bowman. Bowman, who faced well-funded opponents from both the crypto and pro-Israel lobby, was defeated in what became the most expensive House primary race ever.

In the 14 years since the Citizens United ruling opened the floodgates for big money to gain unprecedented power in U.S. politics, donations from cryptocurrency groups have constituted 15 percent of corporate political contributions. The industry’s spending—which totals $129 million since 2010—puts it second only to the fossil fuel industry. 

Not wanting to get on the industry’s bad side, politicians across the aisle shifted towards a more crypto-friendly stance in this past election. None did so in a more cynical fashion than President Donald Trump. Having been on the record calling crypto a scam as recently as 2021, Trump would run in 2024 with the promise to make America “the crypto capital of the planet.” 

In May of last year, Trump became the first presidential candidate to accept bitcoin donations. Soon after, he received $2.5 million from Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twin founders of cryptocurrency exchange Gemini. Trump’s response to the donation was fawning, as he described the pair as “male models with a big, beautiful brain.” But perhaps more useful to the twins is Trump’s replacement of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Gary Gensler (whom the Winklevosses have described as “evil”) with Paul Atkins (a noted ally of the industry). 

However, while Trump seemed to receive the bulk of crypto’s support, Kamala Harris was not without high-profile, deep-pocketed backers in this regard. In September, Axios reported that the then-vice president used a Wall Street fundraiser to signal her friendliness to the crypto industry. The event would raise $27 million, marking the biggest single-day haul of her campaign up until that point. Meanwhile, Chris Larsen, the chair of cryptocurrency company Ripple, would give the Harris campaign almost $12 million. 

Recognizing the power of the cryptocurrency industry ahead of time, many members (and would-be members) of Congress facing election in 2024 made sure to avoid getting on the wrong side of the industry early on. The most obvious illustration of this came via a congressional vote on the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21). The act constituted the most comprehensive effort to regulate cryptocurrency to date, but further tipped the balance in the industry’s favor.

If passed, the act would see cryptocurrency treated as a commodity rather than a security. This would subject the currency to significantly looser restrictions—opening the floodgates for yet greater fraud and exploitation of traders—and see regulation handed over from the relatively more hawkish Securities and Exchange Commission to the weaker and more industry-friendly Commodity Futures Trading Commission. As SEC chair, Gensler warned that the legislation would likely undermine investor protections.

Despite Gensler’s warnings, 71 Democrats joined almost all Republicans in supporting the bill’s passage in the House—including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But Sherrod Brown, then-Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, would block the bill’s advancement in the Senate, solidifying his position as Public Enemy Number One in the eyes of the crypto lobby. 

Fairshake, along with other crypto groups, quickly identified Brown as their top congressional target. Seeing that Brown, a Democrat, was running for reelection in Ohio (a state previously won by Trump over Biden by nearly 500,000 votes), they sensed an opportunity. Fairshake alone spent $40 million trying to defeat the senator while boosting the reputation of his Republican opponent—a previously little-known luxury car dealer, Bernie Moreno, who once claimed that “Our Founding Fathers would have been bitcoiners.” 

The Ohio election was pivotal to maintaining Democrats’ narrow control of the Senate, with Brown being one of two Democratic incumbents (alongside Montana’s Jon Tester) defending a seat in a state Trump won in 2020. Brown was a popular incumbent who had defied his state’s rightward trajectory six years earlier—and mere months before Election Day, Democrats had been hopeful that he could do so again. By the end of July, he held a sizable 6.5 percent lead over Moreno. But as more money came in to boost Moreno, that lead got smaller and smaller until it had evaporated by Election Day. Ultimately, Moreno would defeat Brown by 3.6 percent.

Moreno will now sit on the same Banking Committee that his predecessor recently chaired. (“Senator Thune [the new Senate Majority Leader] was kind enough to get me on Banking,” Moreno celebrated.) In Brown’s place as chair is now Republican Tim Scott, who had already vowed last summer to remove Gensler as SEC Chair, and who received $38,000 from Coinbase’s CEO in the 2024 election cycle despite the fact that Scott was reelected in 2022 and does not face another campaign until 2028. 

Moreno’s win was not an outlier but instead emblematic of an incredibly fruitful 2024 election for the crypto industry—which resulted in a majority of senators and over 270 (out of 435) crypto-friendly members of the House of Representatives. One post-election estimate found that 85 percent of congressional candidates backed by the cryptocurrency industry won. 

Another notch in the industry’s belt arrived via the Michigan Senate election, where the industry was supporting centrist Democrat Elissa Slotkin. As a House representative, Slotkin had voted for FIT21 and was given an A rating by Stand With Crypto. In what proved to be the second-closest Senate race that cycle, she eked out a victory, with less than 20,000 out of over 5 million votes cast separating her and Republican rival Mike Rogers. Another victory for the industry came when, a week after Election Day, the Arizona Senate race was called for Democrat Ruben Gallego. Another FIT21 supporter, he received substantial donations from the cryptocurrency industry that helped allow him to significantly outperform Kamala Harris in a state Donald Trump won by nearly 6 percent. 

We are undoubtedly entering an era of the “most pro-crypto Congress ever,” as Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong boasted after the November elections. Meanwhile, the White House’s ties to the industry only seem to be getting deeper by the day. The weekend before the inauguration, both Donald and Melania Trump launched their own cryptocurrency meme coins. Just days before he was due to once again become leader of the free world, the president-elect posted on X: “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW.” The Vice President, meanwhile, is estimated to hold between $250,000 and $500,000 in bitcoin. 

In this sense, Trump and Vance are outliers among the political class. Although they will find no shortage of fellow crypto advocates in the Senate and House and around the Cabinet table, they will find few fellow investors in the notoriously unstable currency there. A review by data provider 2iQ found that only four members of Congress had reported buying or selling cryptocurrency. Despite their public embrace of the industry, Congress members who actually trust the risky currency—at least enough to put their money where their mouth is—are, evidently, few and far between. 

In this sense, members of Congress are far more aligned with the public at large. A Pew Research poll from last October found that 63 percent of Americans had “little to no” confidence in the safety and reliability of cryptocurrency, while only 5 percent said they were “extremely or very” confident. And though the cryptocurrency industry likes to claim that 52 million Americans own crypto, the actual figure is closer to 18 million—and is on the decline. 

Crypto groups, aware of the widespread public distrust of the industry, responded during the last election by hiding their true intentions. Ohioans spent much of the last year inundated by ads from cryptocurrency companies attacking Sherrod Brown and boosting Moreno in what would become the most expensive Senate race of all time. But absent from these ads was any mention of cryptocurrency. Instead, these groups ran ads with messages about shipping “American innovation to China,” as one commercial warned could happen if Brown was reelected. As one Wall Street Journal headline put it: “Want a crypto-friendly Congress? Run ads that don’t mention crypto.”

The crypto industry uses vast sums of money to create majorities in Congress to champion their unpopular cause—as seen with FIT21’s passage through the House—and advance candidates to the White House who promise to sack industry adversaries like Gary Gensler and replace them with allies like Paul Atkins. This is a sadly familiar story in U.S. politics. Certainly, it’s not dissimilar from the way the National Rifle Association ensures that overwhelmingly popular gun control measures—such as universal background checks, which enjoy 86 percent support—land dead on arrival in Congress. Similarly, the millions of dollars that pro-Israel groups like AIPAC have on hand—and demonstrations of the lobby’s might via the takedowns of Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush—have helped ensure bipartisan support for continuing to fund Israeli weapons, even as polls have shown that three-fifths of Americans want such funding to stop.

As with the successful lobbying efforts of AIPAC and the NRA, crypto’s ability to play and win the Washington corruption game comes at the direct expense of consumers. So much of the industry’s success relies on the deceit and manipulation of its customers—whether that comes in the form of the Bankman-Frieds of the world, who take customers’ billions with the express intention of using it unlawfully, or the countless more subtly insidious companies who drive up their value by marketing unwise and unstable investments towards unknowing consumers. Far from crypto’s lofty promises of creating a democratic exchange space that empowers consumers, the industry has emerged as one whose success hinges on its ability to disempower its own traders and curry favor with elites. 

When Trump took his oath of office, he was surrounded by big players in cryptocurrency and tech at large. Unsurprisingly, Elon Musk—who happens to be a heavy investor in cryptocurrency through his various companies—was there. So was Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who tried unsuccessfully to launch a Facebook-based cryptocurrency in 2020 and has spent the time between November 5 and now desperately trying to get in the good graces of those in Trump’s orbit. Also in attendance was OpenAI’s Sam Altman. 

It’s a striking image and a damning indictment of the faux populism of all involved. At the center of it is Trump, a billionaire who promised to drain the swamp but who has time and time again bowed down to corporate interests (be it crypto investors like the Winklevoss twins or Miriam Adelson, the widow of casino magnate Sheldon). Around him are the tech bros who made their millions (and billions) off of lofty promises to democratize big tech and usher in a fairer and more transparent world. But, in the end, all of them gained political influence by perfecting the age-old game of D.C. corruption. They used their vast resources not to upend the existing system but to work their way up it. As America swore in a new president this year, so too did it push the country closer than ever to oligarchy.